Colin McLarty
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Colin_McLarty.jpg/220px-Colin_McLarty.jpg)
Colin McLarty is an American logician whose publications have ranged widely in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, as well as in the history of science and of mathematics.
Research[]
Category theory[]
He has written papers about Saunders Mac Lane, one of the founders of category theory.
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McLarty's Elementary Categories and Elementary Toposes describes category theory and topos theory at an elementary level.[1]
McLarty worked on establishing that Fermat's Last Theorem can be proven in a setting with much weaker assumptions than the ones used in Wiles' proof, which makes use of involved category theoretical constructions.[citation needed]
History of Mathematics[]
He is a member of the Grothendieck Circle, which provides on-line and open access to many writings about the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, who revolutionized Banach-space theory and algebraic geometry and whose life has fascinated many biographers and mathematical scientists.[2]
McLarty has also written about the German algebraist Emmy Noether and her involvement with German political history.[3]
Positions[]
At Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Colin McLarty is the Truman P. Handy Professor of Philosophy and the current Chair of the Philosophy Department. [4]
At CWRU, he is also a professor of mathematics.
Bibliography[]
- McLarty, Colin (1992). Elementary Categories, Elementary Toposes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853392-6.
- Colin McLarty, The Uses and Abuses of the History of Topos Theory, Br. J. Philos. Sci, 41 (1990) p 355. doi:10.1093/bjps/41.3.351
- Colin McLarty, 'Emmy Noether’s ‘Set Theoretic’ Topology: From Dedekind to the rise of functors' in The Architecture of Modern Mathematics: Essays in history and philosophy (edited by Jeremy Gray and José Ferreirós), Oxford University Press (2006) p. 187–208.
- McLarty, Colin, 2005, "Saunders Mac Lane (1909–2005): His Mathematical Life and Philosophical Works," Philosophia Mathematica 13: 237–51. With selected bibliography emphasizing Mac Lane's philosophical writings.
- --------, 2007, "The Last Mathematician from Hilbert's Göttingen: Saunders Mac Lane as Philosopher of Mathematics,", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58(1): 77–112.
See also[]
- "Abstract nonsense", a (usually ironic) term for category theory and category-theoretic arguments in homological algebra
- "Generalized abstract nonsense", an ironic and affectionate term for topos theory
- Other topos theorists (besides Saunders Mac Lane):
References[]
- ^ *Elementary Categories, Elementary Toposes.
- ^ website of the Grothendieck Circle.
- ^ Journal History of Mathematics.
- ^ "Letter from the Chair – Department of Philosophy".
External links[]
- Personal website of Colin McLarty
- CWRU website of Colin McLarty
- Grothendieck Circle, which lists McLarty as a member. (A collection of mathematical and biographical information, photos, links about Alexander Grothendieck.)
- Colin McLarty at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Category theorists
- Mathematical logicians
- American logicians
- Philosophers of mathematics
- Historians of mathematics
- Philosophers of science
- Historians of science
- Intellectual historians
- Algebraists
- Algebraic geometers
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- 20th-century American philosophers
- Living people
- 21st-century American philosophers